UK High Court grants US government right to appeal on Assange extradition

Laura Tiernan

Stella Moris, the partner of imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, spoke outside Britain’s High Court yesterday warning he is “still at risk of extradition” after a judge decided the US government can appeal an earlier court ruling that blocked his extradition on health grounds.

The judge also ruled that Assange must remain in prison until the appeal is heard, effectively extending his incarceration for at least many more months.

Stella Moris speaking outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London (Credit: Twitter/@DEAcampaign)

The ruling underscores the Biden administration’s determination to ensure Assange’s removal to the US. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, based on excerpts of the judge’s ruling supplied by the UK Crown Prosecution Service, the US government offered “assurances” that Assange would not be imprisoned in oppressive conditions and could be permitted to serve any sentence in Australia.

Such assurances are meaningless. Once Assange is in US custody, those pledges will be cast aside. The Wall Street Journal reported: “The US said it reserved the right to impose special measures on Mr. Assange, or hold him in a Supermax jail, if ‘he were to do something subsequent to the offering of these assurances’ that meets the test for applying them.”

Assange has been denied bail and remains detained in London’s Belmarsh Prison despite a January decision by District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser denying his extradition to the US. Assange faces trumped-up charges under the Espionage Act over his exposure of war crimes, illegal mass surveillance and torture by the US and its allies. He has been held captive in the UK for a decade.

Baraitser ruled January 4 that Assange’s extradition to a US federal prison would be “oppressive” because of his compromised mental health and risk of suicide. The US Department of Justice (DoJ) under President Donald Trump immediately appealed Baraitser’s decision. Two days later, Trump mounted a fascist coup attempt in Washington D.C. The Democrats under Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris have seamlessly continued US imperialism’s political vendetta against Assange.

The WikiLeaks publisher is being held in violation of his First Amendment rights to free speech and freedom of the press and in breach of international human rights law.

Britain’s High Court has reportedly granted a right of appeal to the US on three grounds. The court will decide whether Baraitser applied the Extradition Act correctly; whether sufficient advance notice was given of the court’s decision, and whether “assurances” by the US over mitigating the risk of suicide were properly considered.

A date for the appeal hearing has not been announced, but it will likely take place after the courts’ summer recess. This leaves Assange imprisoned at Belmarsh indefinitely in conditions long condemned by doctors and human rights lawyers as “psychological torture.”

In a letter sent yesterday to Biden and US Attorney General Merrick Garland by Doctors for Assange, 250 doctors from 35 countries demanded the dropping of all charges against the WikiLeaks publisher. They denounced his ongoing imprisonment due to the US appeal as “amounting to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in the UK.”

They noted: “Today, the UK High Court granted the US limited permission to appeal the earlier UK ruling against the U.S. extradition request. Crucially, the High Court did not permit the US to appeal findings based on Assange’s medical and psychological status, and affirmed the previous judge’s findings regarding his clinical condition… Meanwhile, Mr. Assange continues to suffer serious, life threatening effects of the psychological torture he has been subjected to for more than a decade.”

Moris, a human rights lawyer and mother of Assange’s two young children, warned yesterday that the High Court’s decision meant her partner “is still at risk of extradition where he faces a 175-year prison sentence and where according to the magistrate he is almost certain to lose his life.”

Her remarks exposed the lawlessness of US efforts to punish Assange, “The case is itself falling apart. The lead witness of the US Department of Justice [Sigurdur Thordarson] now admits that he lied in exchange for immunity from US prosecutors. The lawyers of Julian were spied on, their officers were broken into, even our six-month-old baby was targeted while he was in the embassy.”

Moris explained: “This case is the most vicious attack on global press freedom in history. The US government is accusing a foreign journalist, a foreign publisher who is outside the United States, for publishing true information that incriminated the US military of committing war crimes.

“Julian is a freedom fighter. He fights for freedom from torture, freedom from illegal wars, freedom from surveillance and manipulation. That is what the US government is criminalising. There’s no way to stand up for the First Amendment and defend democracy at the same time that you are prosecuting and imprisoning Julian Assange.”

Moris described the crippling legal costs borne by Assange as he continues his fight for freedom. “Many people don’t know this, but the US government is allowed to appeal and have its costs paid by the UK taxpayer. Julian on the other hand has to fund his defence himself. Even though he won in January and the US government has decided to appeal that decision, Julian has to pay for his legal costs… every aspect of this case is profoundly unjust. Julian is being punished for doing his job as a journalist.”

Earlier yesterday, Moris visited Assange at Belmarsh Prison, accompanied by their eldest son who is four. “Julian is very unwell,” Moris reported afterwards. “Belmarsh prison is a horrible, horrible, place. Just yesterday, another prisoner was found dead in his cell. The suicide rate is three times higher than in other UK prisons. It’s a daily struggle.”

She continued: “He won his case in January. Why is he even in prison? Why is he even being prosecuted? There is no legal case against him. All there is is an indictment based on lies. They recruited a convicted embezzler, a convicted sex criminal [Thordarson] against minors, a man who was diagnosed with sociopathy and that man has now admitted that he lied and that those lies are in the US indictment that is keeping Julian in prison.

“Lies are keeping Julian in prison. And now the abuses are just so monumental, and they just accumulate and at some point, sanity has to kick in. They are criminalising journalism. Just look at the indictment, the criminalising of receiving and communicating true information to the public, that no one denies was in the public interest, that evidence war crimes, that evidence torture, that evidenced illegal rendition.”

Asked for Assange’s reaction to the decision to grant an appeal, Moris replied, “I was able to speak to Julian about the decision. It’s mixed, because on the one hand it’s been six months and we haven’t heard any news, so it’s like an endless Purgatory. But at the same time, it doesn’t end here, and so we have to prepare. We don’t know how long this will go on for, and how long he’ll be imprisoned for in that terrible place.”

The US suggestion that it would consent to Assange being transferred to Australia to serve any jail sentence indicates that the WikiLeaks founder continues to face a multi-state conspiracy by the imperialist powers led by the US, Britain and Australia. These “assurances” are ominous. They are designed to provide the British courts the pretext to extradite Assange despite his medical condition.

No faith can be placed in the sadistic promises and conspiracies of US imperialism and its political accomplices. Assange’s freedom cannot be won via moral appeals to the state. The fight to free Assange must be taken into the working class and fused with its worldwide struggles against the pandemic, austerity, social inequality, and the ever-growing threat of war produced by capitalism.

Pandemic surges in South Korea as government pushes to end social distancing

Ben McGrath

The number of daily new COVID-19 cases is rising again in South Korea, reaching their highest levels in months, including 1,275 infections on July 7. The number of new cases in Seoul the previous day reached 583, the most in the city since the pandemic began. The numbers continue to climb as the more dangerous and contagious delta variant begins to take hold.

However, central and local governments are pushing to remove even the limited measures in place to control the virus. Since the end of January, new cases of COVID-19 in South Korea have ranged between 300 and 700 per day, but plans remain to relax social distancing measures. On June 24, when the government announced it would proceed, despite an uptick in cases, the seven-day national average for new infections stood at 489. As of July 6, the number had shot up to 768. In total, more than 2,000 people have died from the virus.

People wearing face masks as a precaution against the coronavirus walk through a tunnel in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, May 24, 2021 [Credit: AP Photo/Lee Jin-man]

The central government enacted a new 4-tier social distancing scheme on July 1, which ends most of the measures throughout the country, with the exception of the Seoul metropolitan area, where approximately 80 percent of the new infections have been discovered. This region, which includes the capital city, Gyeonggi Province, and Incheon, is densely populated and home to approximately half of South Korea’s 51 million residents.

The “Level 1” restrictions in place for the rest of the country are basically non-existent. The new rules lift curfews on businesses, such as restaurants and bars, so long as they maintain the inadequate 1 meter of space between customers, and allow an unlimited number of people to gather. While provincial and city governments have stated they will maintain a cap of eight people on groups in public, they also plan to remove this restriction by July 14.

Given the surge in cases in the Seoul area, the government postponed the relaxation of social distancing until July 7, and has extended restrictions again for another week. This means public gatherings of five or more people are banned and most businesses must close by 10pm.

The government has also lifted an outdoor mask mandate for those who have been vaccinated, despite the possibility that they can still pass on the virus. This decision was reversed in the Seoul area, but the constant vacillation between what measures are in force or not, has caused confusion among the population.

Even these limited restrictions have been entirely inadequate in bringing down the number of daily cases. Furthermore, the Moon Jae-in administration is essentially sending the message that the pandemic is largely over, and people can disregard safety measures. This has been done specifically to benefit big business, regardless of the consequences for working people.

In daily life, people are expressing concern over the lack of protection. A 35-year-old office worker told the Korea Times, “Fears are growing over the highly transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus, especially in the Seoul metropolitan area, but many workers are still on packed subways and buses, in order to get to work. I don't think the situation will improve this way.”

In fact, workers throughout South Korea have been kept on the job throughout the pandemic, in large measure thanks to the unions, including the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), which has refused to address workplace safety outside of token protests. Early in the pandemic, the KCTU made clear it would not take action against the government. In recent weeks, it has also moved quickly to shut down strikes, over conditions in industries such as package delivery, construction, and manufacturing.

Schools have also been kept open, contributing to the spread of the virus. Currently, students attend classes on a rotational basis, with some students studying in person and others online. This is clearly insufficient for keeping students and teachers safe. Demonstrating the danger, as of Tuesday, 23 elementary students at a school in Incheon have tested positive for COVID-19. Similar outbreaks have occurred in recent weeks at other schools and private after-school academies, infecting students, teachers and their families.

The central government, however, is still pushing ahead with plans to re-open schools to full in-person learning in late August, during the second half of the school year. Parents have raised concerns with these plans. One mother of a middle school student wrote in an online forum, “Students have yet to be vaccinated, as they come almost last in the list [of those eligible to receive vaccines], and younger ones are not on the list at all. I don’t understand why the government is planning to let all students attend in-person classes in this situation.”

The government’s action on behalf of the capitalist class conflicts with the advice of medical professionals. Son Yeong-rae, a senior health official, warned recently that the delta variant was “rapidly increasing,” now accounting for 7 percent of new cases, compared to less than 1 percent two months ago. Health experts are urging the government to adopt stricter anti-virus measures, not ease them.

In an interview with the Korea Herald published on June 27, Dr. Paik Soon-young, professor emeritus at the Catholic University of Korea, College of Medicine, warned of the growing danger.

He said that the public messaging had to pivot from ‘all is normal’ and ‘enjoy this summer’ to ‘don’t let your guard down until more of us are vaccinated.’ He continued, “Unless the right interventions are undertaken, Korea is too under-vaccinated to withstand the inevitable new variant… The more we don’t know, the more careful we want to be. But we seem to be doing the opposite.”

While South Korea’s vaccination program began in February, little more than 30 percent of the population has received a single dose, and only around 10 percent is fully vaccinated. Most of those who have received the vaccine are over 60 years of age, leaving workers, who must work, and young people going to school vulnerable.

Indonesia engulfed in “India-type” second wave

Robert Campion

In Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, a humanitarian disaster is unfolding similar to what occurred in India in late May. While it is being fueled by the more virulent Delta strain, the surge in cases is taking place primarily because of the government’s lack of preventative measures—in line with the demands of big business.

Official daily deaths on Wednesday—following a string of broken records in the weeks prior—crossed the 1,000 mark for the first time with 1,040 deaths, up from 728 a day earlier. This is seven times what was recorded less than a month ago.

Workers take a break during a busy day at Rorotan Cemetery, which is reserved for those who died of COVID-19, in Jakarta, Indonesia, Thursday, July 1, 2021 (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)

Total daily cases also hit a new record of 34,379, up from 31,189 on Tuesday. The total number of COVID-19 cases is now 2,379,397 and the death toll is 62,908. Owing to the lack of testing and a 1-in-5 positivity rate, health experts are almost certain that the real daily tallies are of orders of magnitude higher.

Only 6 percent of the population of 270 million is fully vaccinated, a rate similar to other oppressed countries which are in dire need of vaccines. According to the World Health Organisation, many health workers—including 6,000 in Aceh and 5,000 in Papua—have not even had their first dose.

With the country utterly exposed, there is a great danger that the current strain could mutate, threatening to upend vaccination efforts not just for Indonesia but internationally.

Epidemiologists have been scathing in their assessment of the government, which has deliberately fostered a climate of what some have called “herd stupidity,” whether through downplaying the risks associated with the pandemic, refusing to institute lockdowns, inconsistent health advice and the promotion of quack remedies.

Last May, hundreds of thousands travelled across the country for the Muslim Ramadan celebrations. The government made half-hearted restrictions on participations in the Eid celebrations, while allowing free rein for people to visit tourist attractions.

The absence of compensation for workers has also hampered lockdown efforts, as workers are forced to choose between working and starvation. Of the roughly 120 million working in Indonesia, 70 million earn their livelihoods in the “informal” sector living a hand-to-mouth existence. As a result, many are driven by desperation to defy lockdown measures.

In the city of Semarang, authorities have reportedly fired water hoses at shops that refused to close. Jakarta governor, Anies Baswedan, ordered dozens of offices to be sealed on Tuesday after some employers ignored work-from-home orders.

Epidemiologist Dicky Budiman, who has worked many years to prepare Indonesia’s health system, predicts a shocking 300,000 to 500,000 cases a day by August, citing the failure of the government to impose preventative measures early enough.

Restrictions on movement were instituted just last Saturday for the hardest hit islands of Java and Bali, but stopped short of full lockdowns as they were only imposed in designated “emergency zones.” As of yesterday, the measures were expanded to cover areas on all islands, mostly on Sumatra.

The restrictions are set to continue until July 20 and include the closure of shopping malls, houses of worship and leisure centres including parks. Non-essential sectors designated as those that are not energy, health or security, have been given 75 percent work-from-home requirements. Financial sectors are working at 50 percent capacity.

The impact of the Delta variant has been hardest on the island of Java, where over 150 million Indonesians reside in an area approximately half the size of New Zealand.

Hospitals have been inundated with the sick. Almost all have occupancy rates at full capacity, including the major intensive care wards at Cengkareng Hospital in the west of Jakarta, Bekasi City Hospital in West Java and all hospitals in Surabaya, the second biggest city.

More than a dozen facilities in Surabaya reportedly turned away patients because they could not handle the influx. “We’re overwhelmed,” said a hospital spokeswoman in an interview with SBS. “Many of our health workers have collapsed from exhaustion and some are also infected. We trying to get volunteers to help out.”

Oxygen tanks have dried up in some areas, prompting the government to urge national suppliers to divert 90 percent of their production to medical needs. On Tuesday, Jakarta reported that 10,000 oxygen concentrators were to be shipped from nearby Singapore. The government is also asking China for assistance.

Daily burials in the capital are up 10-fold since May, with 392 burials on Saturday, overwhelming the cemetery workers involved.

Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan stated in a video conference: “According to our data, the Delta variant made up 90 percent of new transmissions in Jakarta.”

He added that authorities were preparing for much higher daily cases. “The number of daily cases can still increase to 40,000 or more. We are taking actions to cope with all possible scenarios in terms of medical supplies, oxygen and hospital capacity.”

In other islands, officials have cited “significant increases” in daily infections and active cases. The occupancy rates for hospital beds treating COVID-19 patients in Lampung, Riau Islands, West Sumatra, East Kalimantan and West Papua provinces have all exceeded 60 percent.

The virus is also spreading among young people. Around 250,000 children have been infected according to official data, or 12.6 percent of all cases. Of the 676 children who have died, about 50 percent were under 5 years old.

There are also long-term health problems associated with the virus, with much still unknown. Doctors have said that six to eight months after recovering from the virus, children may become weaker, experience shortness of breath, hair loss, muscle pain, and have difficulty concentrating at school.

Facing widespread anger over the government’s handling of the disease, President Joko Widodo announced an expedited vaccination program on Twitter. “Our target this month is 34 million doses, August 43.7 million, September 53 million, October 84 million, November 80.9 million, and December 71.7 million.

“With hard work, this target is not difficult as long as there is a vaccine,” he said. However, the country has so far received only 119 million shots of Sinovac, Sinopharm and AstraZeneca. More vaccines are being promised from the US, Japan and Australia.

As in other countries, the requirements of dealing with the pandemic are being deliberately ignored by the government to safeguard “the economy,” which means protecting big business and its profits. Empty promises that prosperity is “just around the corner” are a desperate and cynical ploy to deflect mounting public anger.

Afghanistan: the Darkening Glass

John Clamp

There is an air of inevitability, and trepidation, and déja vu, gripping Afghanistan. The Taliban are back, and they are closing their fingers around Ashraf Ghani’s government like a fist, squeezing.

Casualties are not yet on the scale of the civil war. The Taliban are biding their time, encircling cities, waiting for the Americans to depart. Many local garrisons have surrendered anyway, while elsewhere, tribal elders have negotiated bloodless transfers of power.

When Ghani and his government, riddled with corruption and edging rapidly towards irrelevance, look down, they see only paint. They’re in a corner from which no amount of U.S. ‘support’ (bombs) can extricate them. Their collaboration with foreign powers has marked them with a black spot, too, that no soap can wash off.

Yet in strict terms, the Taliban were created from the same geopolitical rib: Ghani’s government and the Taliban are both cotton sugar confections spun by foreign powers. The U.S.A., Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, and India are all up to their necks in this multiplayer iteration of the Great Game. The Talibs are not so much the ‘scholars’ their name implies; they’re more of an armed faction. They reconstituted themselves to fight the invaders, and they have an ideology that because of its Islamic flavour makes them generally comprehensible. The failure of statecraft in Afghanistan by Ghani has fueled their revivification.

Meanwhile, enthusiasm for the Talib ‘scholars’ is rather thin on the ground, worldwide. China is not a big fan, ill-disposed as it is to anything with the word ‘Islamic’ in it (the Taliban intend to set up the ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’, a political entity with the same name as the one they established in 1996). Russia isn’t mad keen on them either. The Western powers loathe the Taliban, but they saw they could never win the conflict and simply had to cut their losses. The Taliban have attended the talks just enough to keep the ball rolling as they position themselves in-country, and have been regularly accused of bad faith in Doha. They used their special UN travel permissions not to fly back to the UAE but to visit Moscow.

In Afghanistan itself, many remember the excesses of Taliban 1.0, and scratch militias are popping up to fight them off. The Taliban are widely reviled for their adolescent neuroses over women and music, and their propensity for ultraviolence, so what does their de facto control of the countryside say about the standing of the central government? A trillion dollars and more has utterly failed to provide Afghan citizens with a sense of security.

None of it bodes well, unfortunately. Once the Yanks go home, Taliban forces will make their final push on urban centres, at which point the body count will rise once again. Will America ‘do a Vietnam’ and deal decades of spiteful passive aggression, having been whupped yet again in a war of invasion? The ingredients are there for a long-run tragedy to befall the Afghans yet again. We all hope not.

Africa faces a third more deadly COVID-19 surge as vaccination drive stalls

Jean Shaoul

Africa is facing an unprecedented increase in the number of COVID-19 infections, with new cases increasing for six weeks running and rising by an average of 25 percent week-on-week, to almost 202,000 in the week ending 28 June.

Health officials have warned that a new wave like the one that ripped through India in April and May could be looming.

Africa has officially registered more than 4.8 million cases and 130,000 deaths, representing 2.9 percent of global cases and 3.7 percent of deaths. But this is a gross underestimate under conditions where there are few facilities for testing those who exhibit symptoms, a lack of standardised reporting procedures for registering deaths and many countries do not collect mortality data.

In this Thursday June 17, 2021 file photo medical staff wearing protective equipment attend to patients affected by COVID-19, on the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of the Machakos County Level-5 hospital in Machakos, Kenya. Driven by the delta variant, a new wave of COVID-19 is sweeping across the African continent where new cases, hospital admissions, and deaths are increasing. (AP Photo/Brian Inganga/File)

South Africa, the continent’s most industrialised nation and the worst affected country, has reported around 60,000 deaths. But its excess mortality figures indicate that another 100,000 people, if not more, have died directly or indirectly because of the pandemic. Extrapolated across the continent, this would mean that the real death toll is approaching 500,000.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that the 60 percent more transmissible and more deadly Delta variant could mean Africa's third wave is far more serious. At least 21 countries have so far experienced a third wave of infections, with 10 of those experiencing a more severe wave than before. The worst affected are Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia, Zambia, Rwanda, South Africa, Ethiopia and Kenya.

The Delta variant has been reported in 16 African countries so far, with three of the five countries reporting the highest number of new cases confirming the presence of the variant. In DR Congo and Uganda, 66 percent of the cases of severe illness in people under 45 years of age have been attributed to the Delta variant.

According to the Africa Centres for Disease Control (CDC), 21 African countries are reporting death rates above the global average of 2.2 percent. A study published in The Lancet suggests that the higher death rate is the result of limited healthcare resources. For example, researchers examining the records of patients hospitalised across 10 African countries, found that nearly half of those who needed intensive care died, compared with the global average of less than a third.

This third wave takes place amid dire warnings about the shortage of hospital beds, ventilators, oxygen supplies and healthcare professionals needed to treat critically ill patients, the lack of testing facilities and a vaccination drive that has yet to start.

Speaking on Thursday, Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO’s regional director for Africa, warned that the third wave hitting the continent was “like nothing we've seen before.” She said, “The Delta variant of concern is the most contagious we've seen.”

She made a vain appeal to the rich countries to share their vaccines, which are in short supply. The global vaccine shortage has been exacerbated by the World Trade Organization’s refusal, due to the ferocious opposition of the US, UK, Germany, France, and Sweden on behalf of Big Pharma, to lift patent restrictions on vaccine production—even as millions of the world’s poor succumb to the disease. This would reduce the price, enabling manufacturing at multiple sites in Africa and elsewhere.

Africa imports 99 percent of the vaccines it uses (and 70 percent of all pharmaceutical products), despite having actual and potential manufacturing capacity in Egypt, Senegal, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. It is largely reliant on two sources: Covax, which is supplying the AstraZeneca vaccine, and the African Union’s deal with Johnson & Johnson, which has agreed to provide 220 million doses.

The crisis in India has also impacted the vaccine rollout because most of the vaccines supplied so far to Africa via Covax have been AstraZeneca shots manufactured there. India suspended its exports of the vaccine in March to cope with domestic demand, leading John Nkengasong, the director of the Africa CDC, to warn that the situation in India could affect Africa’s vaccine rollout “for the weeks and perhaps months to come.”

Further exacerbating the vaccine famine is the “vaccine apartheid”, whereby the rich countries bought up not only most of the available doses but far more than they needed, sabotaging any possibility of a rational or equitable distribution of the shots. According to Barclays analysts, the world’s richest nations have secured enough deliveries of approved vaccines to cover their populations four and a half times over while the poorest have only been able to secure enough for 10 percent of their populations.

The US and the European imperialist powers have responded with promises of vaccines that amount to a drop in the ocean. The US Biden administration has pledged 80 million doses, and the European Union 100 million, and even these will be distributed in line with their own perceived geopolitical interests. The UK has responded by slashing its aid budget, as well as its funding for water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) projects, affecting not just overseas expenditure but scientific research, including programmes at Oxford University that are identifying and tracking new variants of the coronavirus.

The figures are stark. Just over 1 percent of Africa’s 1.2 billion population have been fully vaccinated, compared to 11 percent of people globally, and over 46 percent in the United Kingdom and the United States. According to Nkengasong, Africa had aimed to have 800 million doses, largely through an African Union initiative, by December this year, but has so far only received 65 million. Many African countries are running out of their supplies from the Covax scheme that has shipped less than 90 million doses worldwide.

Should the vaccination rollout fail in Africa, new and more dangerous variants could emerge. The lack of money is making matters worse. The charity Care has estimated that for every $1 spent on purchasing vaccines, another $5 is needed for their distribution and use. Covax says it needs about another $3 billion to implement its plans for buying and delivering vaccines this year. While the World Bank pledged $12 billion for vaccines and their rollouts in developing countries, as of July 1, it had approved projects worth only $4.4 billion, of which $1.7 billion were in Africa.

Compounding the healthcare crisis are the terrible economic conditions that most African countries face. According to World Bank estimates, the global economy shrank by 4.3 percent in 2020, wiping out trillions of dollars, with the poorest countries the worst affected. Africa’s tourism sector, for example, that contributed 8.5 percent to the continent’s GDP, is unlikely to recover for years. A recent report by Oxfam International estimates that it could take more than a decade for the world’s poorest to recover from the economic fallout of the pandemic, while the Pew Research Center estimates that of the 131 million people pushed into poverty across the world, 40 million were in Sub-Saharan Africa, adding to the 494 million already living in poverty before the pandemic.

The response of capitalist governments the world over has been to reject the need for a global vaccination campaign. Their criminal indifference to the plight of the world’s poorest—the very people most at risk to the virus—expresses the entire capitalist social order that subordinates human needs to the enrichment of the financial oligarchy and the predatory interests of imperialism. That is why the fight to contain the pandemic is inseparable from the fight to put an end to the capitalist social order and replace it with socialism.

Coronavirus infections surge among detained immigrants in US

Trévon Austin

As the number of migrants imprisoned in US detention centers grows, immigration officials are reporting a major surge in COVID-19 infections among detainees. Very few detainees are vaccinated against the virus, and public health experts worry that the crowded detention facilities could fuel outbreaks not only among those detained, but also in the general population.

As of June 23, there were 765 active COVID-19 cases among migrants in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.

According to ICE, the number of migrants being held in detention centers has nearly doubled in recent months. In April, the agency reported some 14,000 migrants in detention. Last week the agency reported that more than 26,000 people were being detained.

Within that same period, more than 7,500 new COVID-19 cases have been reported in US immigration facilities, accounting for more than 40 percent of all cases reported in ICE facilities since the pandemic began, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data.

ICE previously confirmed over 10,000 cases of COVID-19 among detainees in its detention facilities across the US as of March of this year. It also confirmed eight deaths.

The virus also impacted over 27,000 Border Patrol employees, who either became infected or were unable to work due to illness or quarantining, including 24 who died.

The increase in apprehensions, detentions and infections takes place amid the Biden administration’s escalating campaign against immigrants. Vice President Kamala Harris visited Guatemala and Mexico last month. In addition to telling migrants, “Do not come,” she urged the authorities to shore up their security forces to violently suppress the flow of Central American migrants seeking to escape societies ravaged by more than a century of US imperialist exploitation and oppression.

In April, the Biden administration summarily deported 111,714 of the more than 178,000 migrants detained by US Border Patrol. The administration is continuing to invoke Title 42, a Trump-era Centers for Disease Control and Prevention public health order ostensibly aimed at controlling the pandemic by closing the southern border, as justification for its violation of international and US laws on the right to asylum.

The tens of thousands of migrants trapped in immigration jails face inhumane conditions, with immigrants, including children, subjected to overcrowding, extreme cold and inedible food. As of May, according to ICE’s latest available data, only about 20 percent of detainees passing through the centers had received at least one dose of a vaccine while in custody. Such conditions guarantee a rapid spread of the disease.

Nearly one in three inmates of federal and state prisons and jails are currently testing positive for the virus.

In May, the American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed dozens of lawsuits against ICE during the pandemic, called the lack of a vaccine strategy for the detained migrants a “failure” in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and acting ICE Director Tae Johnson.

Three medical experts contracted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and represented by the Government Accountability Project examined protocols in place to control the spread of COVID-19 in detention centers and found that the Biden administration is not doing enough to vaccinate immigrants in detention.

In a letter to Congress, these experts wrote: “The Biden administration has made great strides in controlling the pandemic in many areas of the country, largely by concentrating on vaccine distribution to the general public. Immigrant detention settings, however, continue to be a significant source of spread for COVID and disproportionate harm to detainees, workers and the public, yet DHS has still not implemented a comprehensive plan to address the spread of COVID in immigration detention facilities.”

ICE previously described its vaccination procedures in a document titled “Covid-19 Pandemic Response Requirements.” The agency directed detention facilities to contact their state’s vaccine distribution authorities, such as state or county departments of health, to obtain vaccines.

Some of the worst outbreaks at ICE facilities, including one at the Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, Mississippi, have occurred in states where vaccination rates are far below the national average.

At the onset of the pandemic, ICE developed a series of requirements to help protect detainees and staff from the virus, such as new protocols for intake processing, screening and testing, and social distancing. ICE officials claim all detainees are required to receive COVID-19 testing within 12 hours of arrival and are quarantined for two weeks. However, many officials have reported difficulties in complying with the protocols due to “infrastructure limitations,” among other problems.

Dr. Carlos Franco-Paredes, an associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, who has inspected immigration detention centers during the pandemic, told the Times that several factors were to blame for the surge, including transfers of detainees between facilities, insufficient testing and lax COVID-19 safety measures.

Franco-Paredes said that during a recent inspection of a detention center in Colorado he saw many staff members who were not wearing face coverings properly, adding, “There is minimal to no accountability regarding their protocols.”

Health officials point out that even when immigration officers follow testing and processing protocols, the fact that detainees are transported en masse to the facilities by bus opens them up to exposure before their initial COVID-19 test upon arrival.

Sharon Dolovich, a law professor and director of the Covid Behind Bars Data Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the Times that detained migrants would remain vulnerable to infection until vaccination was made a higher priority at the facilities.

“You have people coming in and out of the facility, into communities where incomplete vaccination allows these variants to flourish, and then you bring them inside the facilities, and that variant will spread,” Dolovich said. “What you’re describing is the combination of insufficient vaccination plus the evolution of the virus, and that is really scary.”

US newspapers hail the rise in teen labor and poverty wages as a “rite of passage”

Andy Thompson

In recent weeks several major US newspapers, including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune, have run articles praising the increase in employment of teenagers. The articles appeared shortly after the publication of the latest jobs report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which showed that the percentage of youth aged 16–19 years old holding jobs increased to 33.2 percent, the highest since 2008.

A theme running through the articles is a sense of jubilation. “Teens are saving the summer,” writes the Journal, with the Post declaring that the higher number of teenage workers is “good news, for the economy and the nation’s soul.” The Tribune ran an op-ed from Charles L. Evans, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago, which argued that increasing the number of teen workers would curb violent crime and youth poverty.

While the capitalist press celebrates that restaurants and bars will reopen now being staffed by high school students, they ignore the social conditions behind the increase in teen employment, principally the COVID-19 pandemic which has caused millions of layoffs and widespread unemployment. Despite the continuing danger of the pandemic and particularly the spread of the Delta variant, businesses that were forced to shut down or cut staff in the last year are now reopening.

However, adult workers have not returned in large numbers to service and retail jobs, which pay poverty wages and generally have working conditions that would facilitate the transmission of the virus. Faced with a labor shortage and unwilling to increase wages, businesses have turned to hiring teenagers who can be more heavily exploited for their labor.

Many states maintain laws that allow businesses to pay workers under 18 far less than the minimum wage. In Illinois, employers can get away with paying young workers $8.50 per hour when the minimum is $11 per hour. In New York, the under-18 minimum wage is just $7.25. In California, where the minimum wage is $14 per hour, laws exist that allow full-time college and high school students to be paid $11.05 per hour. In Georgia and Wyoming, the states with the lowest possible minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, students can be paid just $6.19 per hour.

In addition, a federal law exists for all states that allows employers hiring a worker under 20 years old to be paid a “training wage” as low as $4.25 per hour for the first 90 days of employment. Conveniently, those 90 days would be around the length of time a student would hold a job during the summer while on break from school.

Reading the major papers, one gets a sense that teenagers are taking up jobs simply to pass the time in what would otherwise be a boring summer break. Petula Dvorak, a columnist for the Post, writes a romanticized tale of her 16-year-old son’s experience getting a part-time job at a coffee shop.

After explaining that her son, who became “lonely and depressed” during the shutdowns of the pandemic, is now joyful. All it took to cure his depression, apparently, was pouring coffee for $10 an hour. She writes, “He comes home on fire after a shift, marveling at the technology of each drink machine he learns to use, the intricate coffee recipes he has to learn.”

Anyone who has visited a major coffee or fast-food chain, let alone having worked in one, will be immediately struck by the absurdity of the thought of the young staff staring starry-eyed at the wonders of a coffee machine. If the story can be believed, the young Dvorak will quickly learn not to spend too much time pondering the awesome power of the ice machine, at least not when the manager is watching.

The shallowness of the Post ’s column does not end there.

Dvorak argues, “Everyone should experience work in the service industry. Nothing builds character, empathy, money literacy and people skills like a low-paying job.” She quotes a manager of an Uncle Julio’s restaurant who believes that “it should be mandatory” for teenagers to have to work for a period as a low-wage worker.

The phrase “rite of passage” appears throughout the various press reports on teen jobs, implying that spending your teenage years working to make money for businesses is simply a part of the American Dream. In Dvorak’s column she goes as far to say programs like sports camps, extra tutoring, or traveling and socializing with peers are all wastes of time that could be better spent working.

The reality is that teenagers and other young workers have not been exempt from the social devastation brought on by the pandemic. Despite the lie pushed by both the Trump and Biden administrations, that young people are essentially immune from the virus, over 2,700 people under 30 have died from COVID-19 in the US, with 326 of them being aged 0–17. Large numbers have delayed their college programs or dropped out altogether.

Moreover, young people have seen their parents lose jobs and struggle to provide necessities over the past year. These conditions of desperation and need to support their families with additional income are what is driving teenagers to take on jobs, not a self-imposed character-building exercise or a fascination with refrigerators.

In a report from the Times, Chase Christensen , a principal at a small high school in Wyoming, shares that several students have dropped out with no plans to return to school having taken on full-time jobs to do what they can to earn an income. And the jobs are not the typical retail or restaurant work that are common summer work for high schoolers. Christensen says that his students have taken jobs working night shifts at a nursing home and digging in a gravel pit.

The conditions of life for young people under capitalism have become increasingly bleak and especially so over the course of 2020. A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that approximately 19 percent more Americans died in 2020 than in 2019 and that the death rate for young adults 25 to 34 has dramatically jumped to the levels of 1953.

It is no surprise that a recent poll from Axios and Momentive found that among adults aged 18–24, 54 percent hold a negative view of capitalism. At the same time, support for socialism is growing. An earlier poll in October of 2020 found that support for socialism among people aged 16–23 increased from 40 to 49 percent from 2019 to 2020.

Faced with unprecedented levels of social inequality young people increasingly find themselves in a position where they have no serious future under capitalism. With a collective $1.57 trillion in student debt, low-wage jobs and seemingly no way out, young people are increasingly looking for a serious political alternative.

US imperialism’s criminal debacle in Afghanistan

Bill Van Auken

US troops pulled out of the sprawling Bagram Air Base at three in the morning last Friday, without notifying the Afghan government forces meant to replace them, and cutting off the power on the way out, an act that triggered an invasion of the base by a small army of looters.

This ignoble retreat is a fitting symbol of the debacle wrought by 20 years of US war and occupation in Afghanistan. Bagram, built by the Soviet military in the 1950s and vastly expanded by the Americans, was at the heart of US imperialism’s two-decade-long criminal war of aggression.

Hundreds of thousands of US personnel passed through the base in the longest war in US history. From Bagram, US warplanes carried out bombing campaigns that claimed the lives of countless thousands of Afghan civilians, and special forces kill teams launched raids in which entire families were wiped out. The base, moreover, housed the Parwan Detention Facility where thousands of suspected insurgents were imprisoned and the methods of “enhanced interrogation”, i.e., torture were employed. Prisoners were beaten, attacked by dogs, shackled to the ceiling, subjected to sexual humiliation and sleep deprivation, and, in some cases, tortured to death.

A member of the Afghan security forces walks in the sprawling Bagram air base after the American military departed, in Parwan province north of Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, July 5, 2021. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)

Bagram was abandoned in the midst of an unmitigated rout of Afghan security forces at the hands of the Taliban insurgency. The Taliban has overrun roughly a quarter of the country’s districts in the space of a few weeks–in addition to the territories it already controlled. Government soldiers have handed over bases and stockpiles of US-supplied weapons and, in some cases, joined the Islamist fighters. Monday saw more than 1,000 government troops flee across Afghanistan’s northeastern border into the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan to escape the fighting.

This rout, which seems to confirm the worst-case scenario prepared by US intelligence agencies that Kabul could fall within six months of a US withdrawal, has touched off an increasingly bitter “who lost Afghanistan” dispute in Washington. Right-wing Republican politicians have indicted the Biden administration, while proclaiming their deep concern for the rights of Afghan women. Biden’s supporters have in turn pointed out that it was the Trump administration that signed the agreement with the Taliban in Qatar in February 2020 mandating the US pullout.

The reality is that the United States lost Afghanistan over the course of its two-decade colonial-style occupation, which provoked intense opposition and anger within the Afghan population.

It is conservatively estimated that 175,000 civilians have been killed in the war. If those dying as a result of the conditions of mass displacement and the general destruction of social conditions were to be added, the total doubtless would climb to well over a million.

The US intervention began with a horrific war crime: the mass execution of over 2,000 Taliban prisoners who were suffocated or shot to death in shipping containers after surrendering to US special forces and their Northern Alliance proxies in November 2001. The US war, obscenely dubbed “Operation Enduring Freedom,” produced an unending series of such crimes against the Afghan population. According to conservative estimates, over the past five years alone, some 4,000 Afghan civilians have been killed in US and allied airstrikes, including nearly 800 children.

The empty promises that the US occupation would bring the Afghan people democracy and prosperity have been exposed as a fraud. The puppet regime in Kabul, the product of rigged elections and deals with criminal warlords, lacks any legitimacy. After 20 years of US aid, Afghanistan still ranks 169th (out of 189 countries) on the UN’s Human Development Index, behind most of sub-Saharan Africa.

The US spent $143 billion on Afghanistan’s “reconstruction”, a sum that is greater, adjusted for inflation, than what Washington spent on the entire Marshal Plan for the reconstruction of Western Europe after World War II. This money has produced neither any significant improvement in the lives of the vast majority of Afghans, nor any development of basic infrastructure. It has gone overwhelmingly to line the pockets of one of the most corrupt kleptocracies on the planet, including the military command, which has stolen soldiers’ pay and supplies, contributing mightily to the ongoing collapse of the security forces.

The war’s costs for the United States, besides the trillion dollars spent to fight it, are measured in the deaths of 2,452 US military personnel, along with those of 455 British soldiers and 689 from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Denmark, Australia, Spain and other countries. Thousands of military contractors also lost their lives. There are many among the three-quarters of a million US troops who deployed at least once to Afghanistan who returned maimed or mentally scarred by the dirty colonial war.

With the US withdrawal, the question arises: what justified this sacrifice? The claim that the war was waged to protect the American people from Al Qaeda terrorism is a patent lie. It continued for more than nine years after Osama bin Laden, sick, isolated and under house arrest by Pakistan’s ISI military intelligence agency, was executed by a Navy Seal squad. During that period, Washington funded and armed Al Qaeda elements for its wars of regime change in Libya and Syria.

Moreover, the tragic encounter between the people of Afghanistan and US imperialism began not in 2001, but more than two decades earlier, when the CIA, collaborating with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, mobilized Islamist fighters from throughout the Muslim world for a proxy war against Soviet forces supporting a secular government in Kabul. Among the CIA’s closest collaborators was bin Laden, who founded Al Qaeda with the backing of the US intelligence agency.

The motives for the war, which had nothing to do with the welfare of the American people and everything to do with the interests of the financial and corporate oligarchy, are indicated in some of the criticism of the US withdrawal.

The Washington Post editorialized: “U.S. rivals such as Iran, China and Russia could draw the conclusion that Mr. Biden lacks the stomach to stand up for embattled U.S. allies such as Iraq, Taiwan and Ukraine.”

The Wall Street Journal pointed to “strategic costs” of the withdrawal, stating “An American presence in Afghanistan, including at the large air base at Bagram, has given pause to both Iran to the west and China to the east. A significant American presence in that strategic spot provided at least a bit of a check on Iranian aggression and Chinese expansionism.”

An article by Lt. Col. David Clukey, a retired US Army Special Forces officer, which appeared on the website of the Naval War College, warned that the withdrawal would give “communist China ... an opportunity to undermine 20 years of US efforts while simultaneously enabling People’s Republic of China (PRC) advisors and military forces strategic access and influence in South-Asia - a move that would strengthen deterrence against U.S. military intervention in the region.”

What these statements make abundantly clear is that the disputes over the Afghanistan withdrawal are rooted not in fears of terrorism, much less concerns for women’s rights, but rather the geostrategic interests of US imperialism, particularly in relation to its intensifying confrontation with China.

On October 9, 2001, two days after Washington launched its invasion of Afghanistan and in the teeth of a ferocious propaganda campaign by the US government and the corporate media to sell the war to the American people as revenge for 9/11, the World Socialist Web Site posted a statement titled “Why we oppose the war in Afghanistan.” It exposed the lie that this was a “war for justice and the security of the American people against terrorism” and insisted that “the present action by the United States is an imperialist war” in which Washington aimed to “establish a new political framework within which it will exert hegemonic control” over not only Afghanistan, but the broader Central Asian region, “home to the second largest deposit of proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world.”

The WSWS stated at the time:

The United States stands at a turning point. The government admits it has embarked on a war of indefinite scale and duration. What is taking place is the militarization of American society under conditions of a deepening social crisis.

The war will profoundly affect the conditions of the American and international working class. Imperialism threatens mankind at the beginning of the twenty-first century with a repetition on a more horrific scale of the tragedies of the twentieth. More than ever, imperialism and its depredations raise the necessity for the international unity of the working class and the struggle for socialism.

These warnings have been fully confirmed over the course of the last 20 years, as US imperialism has waged new and equally criminal wars and military attacks from Iraq to Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen, while erecting the scaffolding for a police state within the United States itself.

While there is deep hostility to these wars within the American population, these anti-war sentiments have been repeatedly suppressed and diverted behind the Democratic Party. It regained control of both houses of Congress in 2006 and won the presidency for Barack Obama in 2008 on the back of these sentiments, only to continue and expand America’s wars, including through Obama’s “surge” in Afghanistan.

Whether Biden’s troop withdrawal signals an end to US imperialism’s four decades of death and destruction in Afghanistan remains to be seen. The US military and intelligence apparatus is developing an “over the horizon” capacity to continue bombings, drone strikes and special forces interventions, while the State Department is casting about for new bases in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.

The bid by both Biden and Trump to end the US military occupation of Afghanistan is bound up with preparations for a far more dangerous eruption of US militarism, as Washington shifts its global strategy from the “war on terrorism” to preparations for war against its “great power” rivals, in the first instance, nuclear-armed China and Russia.

Ensuring the end of the 20-year war in Afghanistan and stopping the eruption of new and even more catastrophic wars requires the independent political mobilization of the working class in the US and uniting its growing struggles with those of workers in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and internationally in a socialist anti-war movement. Without the revolutionary intervention of the working class, the threat of a nuclear third world war will only grow.

Food delivery workers in Berlin continue wave of strikes

Markus Salzmann

Workers at the Gorillas delivery service held a number of strikes last week at several of the company’s warehouses in Berlin. They have drawn up a list of demands and indicated that they may continue their job action, which has been provoked by extremely poor working conditions and the confrontational attitude of the company’s management.

On 28 June, several dozen riders, as the workers are known, gathered in front of the company location in Berlin’s Schönhauser Allee. They published a list of 19 demands, including equal pay for equal work, payment for overtime, better equipment, ventilation systems in all warehouses and bikes more suited to transport deliveries.

Solidarity with Santiago

A key demand of the riders is the immediate payment of outstanding wages. By the end of the month, several workers were short on their wages, according to the strikers. The reason given by management was that they had lost income due to being ill, but this is a clear violation of the principle of paid sick leave. In some cases, the riders were only paid for the delivery time, as opposed to their actual working hours, which includes wait times and over which they have no influence. The workers rightly characterize this as “wage theft”. Workers have given management two weeks to respond to the demands.

Company founder and CEO Kağan Sümer showed up during the protest and attempted to appease the angry workers, but without success. Sümer was greeted with placards reading, “Get off your bike and pay us!” A spokesperson for the strikers called for an “end to oppression” at the company. Sümer announced that he wanted to visit a total of 40 company sites across Germany starting on 28 June, in order to do a three-hour shift with his employees and answer their questions. A bike ride in Berlin, which Sümer sought to use to calm the situation down, was cancelled, however, according to media reports.

On 30 June, just two days after one set of the protests, workers at the company branch in the Berlin district of Pankow went on strike. Having been forced to work for four hours in torrential rain with insufficient rain gear, they stopped work at 13.00. As a result, local management had to temporarily halt operations. The strike was suspended in the evening only after a representative promised that the riders would be provided with adequate clothing by the end of the week.

On the same day, about two dozen riders struck in front of the warehouse in Muskauer Straße in Kreuzberg. They also demanded, among other things, waterproof gear.

The jackets and trousers currently provided by the company are completely inadequate, and company spokesperson Tobias Hönig had to admit that what it provides “does not fully protect against getting wet.” At the same time, he launched a broadside against the workforce. “We cannot tolerate the fact that this circumstance has been used as the reason for a spontaneous strike without any legal basis and to call for further strikes in other warehouses,” he told the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel.

One rider told the local TV channel rbb24 that while “rain jackets and rain trousers are available here…they are very dirty.” “We don’t want to wear them, but we have to,” he added. The clothing is also not available in all necessary sizes.

The dangers involved in working without adequate gear were highlighted on July 1 when a rider from Pankow suffered an accident after an ill-fitting rain jacket snagged in her bike. Her injuries were so severe she had to be treated in hospital.

The conflict at the start-up, which attained a company value of one billion dollars in record time and is aiming for a total valuation of six billion dollars, has been simmering for some time and is now assuming ever sharper forms.

Last winter the company failed to provide its riders with warm jackets. Now the company’s warehouses lack any air conditioning, endangering those forced to work during the past several weeks when summer temperatures soared. Riders have long complained about back pain due to their heavy bags and problems arising from defective bicycles. In addition, their hours have recently been extended. They are expected to work shifts between 7 a.m. and midnight.

About three weeks ago, the dismissal of one colleague during his probationary period brought the situation at the company to a head. After one rider named Santiago was let go, about a hundred workers assembled in protest. In solidarity, they blocked two company warehouses in Berlin and demanded his reinstatement. The protest was also directed against Gorillas’ “hire and fire” policy, which uses long probationary periods to dismiss employees when it is convenient. In Santiago’s case, Gorillas justified his dismissal by citing misconduct and alleged unexcused absences.

Now, based on news reports, the company is bracing itself for a possible major strike. According to social media, employees from other areas are to be used as riders if necessary, serving as strikebreakers.

The anger among workers is enormous and there have been calls made to extend the strike wave. Solidarity statements from other workers and the setting up of a solidarity fund on social media are expressions of this anger.

The strikes enjoy considerable public support, with increasing numbers of Gorilla customers declaring that they would no longer use the delivery service if conditions for the workers were not improved.

As the situation intensifies and the strikes widen, workers face urgent political questions. In order for their protests to be successful, Gorilla workers must reject the demand for the involvement of trade unions, which is being raised by several pseudo-left groups around the strike. The call for a works council dominated by the leadership of the NGG (Food, Beverages and Catering Union) is a political trap for workers.